4 ms·

Agreed, article is totally wrong. Read any Amazon review for a cheap household product and you'd conclude that people have outrageously high expectations of qua

Agreed, article is totally wrong. Read any Amazon review for a cheap household product and you'd conclude that people have outrageously high expectations of quality.

MattGaiser 2y ago
I would be interested in knowing if any of those people change their behaviour though. What people say is irrelevant. Do they actually buy differently?
kube-system 2y ago
Regardless of whether or not your point is right -- I don't think Amazon reviews are a good yardstick for this. Product reviews are a tiny but noisy minority, who may or may not even act in line with their grievances. (i.e. some people just like to complain) A better metric would be return rates and/or sales figures.
what 2y ago
That’s not people having a high bar for quality. That’s Amazon being absolutely flooded with low quality products to the point you can’t find anything of even decent quality.
- naniwaduni 2y ago
  The average cheap household product on Amazon is, in fact, Fine.
forgetfreeman 2y ago
If by outrageously high you mean standard expectations from a generation ago I'd be more inclined to agree. I expect to get a minimum of 15 years of service out of a major appliance and really they should last indefinitely with repair and maintenance being a viable option. I expect tools to be made well from the correct materials, properly heat treated where applicable, and for them to withstand at least a decade of borderline abuse, generations under nominal household workloads. I expect any item of furniture I purchase to permanently resolve whatever issue that item of furniture resolves. I shouldn't have to replace a bookshelf in my lifetime. The thing is all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory. Dude says nobody cares about quality, I'd counter with there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it.
- photonthug 2y ago
  > all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory .. there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it. It's worse than that, because even for those who are old enough memory can be short and it's hard to viscerally understand that things were different some 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to see a stress-test for a contemporary low end bookshelf from Walmart vs an older one, and to see a "hours of labor required for purchase" breakdown, but I'm pretty sure I know what it would look like. People are aware that things like planned obsolescence happen, but underestimate how common it is, and are less aware that premium offerings where you pay extra for extra quality are also just a scam. I buy commercial products for everything I can hoping that classic capitalism is still working as intended, because maybe in more B2B transactions which are often high volume, companies are still somewhat afraid of losing a customer while they run their race to the bottom. But the relationship between consumers and corporations has drastically changed to be almost ridiculously adversarial, and increasingly you can't opt out by doing your research, or buying once-trusted brands, or spending extra money. From coffee-makers to mouse traps, almost everything sucks, even after you give up on Amazon. And since we're here, the old saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" also seems hilariously naive and dated. Today you'd start with a marketing department and a few bribes to setup exclusive government and municipal distribution contracts if you were serious, and then make the worst possible trap you could get away with. With 8 billion people and a world-wide market, what kind of idiot would care about customers returning? A startup would invent the perfect thing in a day, then sell it to Big MouseTrap who would squash it, increase ad budgets, and push substandard mouse technology even harder. While we're all getting used to the treadmill of buy, break, and buy again as if this were just normal, let's take a moment to contemplate the old man yelling at the clouds. It's not always for his benefit only, but sometimes truly an effort to educate the public about something they are missing.
  - crote 2y ago
    It does make me wonder why we aren't really seeing "guaranteed quality" brands pop up. There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy. Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
buildsjets 2y ago
Most people don’t write Amazon reviews. Only picky, whiny, complainey people take the time to write Amazon reviews. Or leave Hackernews comments.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- d0mine 2y ago
  Seems a bit self-critical of you to believe that ;)
  - emptiestplace 2y ago
    Excellent joke explanation!
snakeyjake 2y ago
If the article was wrong, those reviews wouldn't even exist because people would never assume that the HOODOOVOODOO-brand product that's 1/4th the price of something that's not named by a passphrase generator is any good due to a basic understanding of how the world works. And Darn Tough would have a monopoly on socks. People only care about cost. The #1 irrefutable indicator of this is airline ticket prices: if Airline A charges $117 for a ticket and Airline B charges $110 but will also kick you in the nuts and nickel-and-dime you for everything to the point that it actually costs more in the end than Airline A... ...people will choose Airline B every time. The vast majority of people will search for a flight, sort by price, and buy the cheapest ticket no matter what.
- prmph 2y ago
  The fact that people choose the cheapest of something does not mean they don't care about quality. It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much. To prove this, imagine if airline A & B had similar very cheap prices (and the attendant poor service that comes with it), but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
  - snakeyjake 2y ago
    >It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much. That, what you just wrote, your own words, not my, but your, assertion, literally and explicitly means that people don't care about quality. >but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B. This is demonstrably false and every airline that has tried has either failed or been subsidized by their national government. (Signed, a former Continental Airlines devotee.)
    - compiler-guy 2y ago
      Plenty of people will never, ever, fly RyanAir. And plenty of people choose an airline based on the airline's loyalty rewards program which gives them a higher-quality product (earlier boarding, more leg room, easier changes to flights). It's quite routine among people who travel a lot. If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them. Yes, airplane travellers are incredibly price conscious--that's the nature of a near-commodity market. But nearly every single flight has a significant fraction of travelers who have paid more for a higher-quality product.

Agreed, article is totally wrong. Read any Amazon review for a cheap household product and you'd conclude that people have outrageously high expectations of quality.

MattGaiser 2y ago

I would be interested in knowing if any of those people change their behaviour though. What people say is irrelevant. Do they actually buy differently?

kube-system 2y ago

Regardless of whether or not your point is right -- I don't think Amazon reviews are a good yardstick for this. Product reviews are a tiny but noisy minority, who may or may not even act in line with their grievances. (i.e. some people just like to complain) A better metric would be return rates and/or sales figures.

what 2y ago

That’s not people having a high bar for quality. That’s Amazon being absolutely flooded with low quality products to the point you can’t find anything of even decent quality.

naniwaduni 2y ago
The average cheap household product on Amazon is, in fact, Fine.

forgetfreeman 2y ago

If by outrageously high you mean standard expectations from a generation ago I'd be more inclined to agree. I expect to get a minimum of 15 years of service out of a major appliance and really they should last indefinitely with repair and maintenance being a viable option. I expect tools to be made well from the correct materials, properly heat treated where applicable, and for them to withstand at least a decade of borderline abuse, generations under nominal household workloads. I expect any item of furniture I purchase to permanently resolve whatever issue that item of furniture resolves. I shouldn't have to replace a bookshelf in my lifetime. The thing is all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory. Dude says nobody cares about quality, I'd counter with there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it.

photonthug 2y ago
> all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory .. there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it. It's worse than that, because even for those who are old enough memory can be short and it's hard to viscerally understand that things were different some 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to see a stress-test for a contemporary low end bookshelf from Walmart vs an older one, and to see a "hours of labor required for purchase" breakdown, but I'm pretty sure I know what it would look like. People are aware that things like planned obsolescence happen, but underestimate how common it is, and are less aware that premium offerings where you pay extra for extra quality are also just a scam. I buy commercial products for everything I can hoping that classic capitalism is still working as intended, because maybe in more B2B transactions which are often high volume, companies are still somewhat afraid of losing a customer while they run their race to the bottom. But the relationship between consumers and corporations has drastically changed to be almost ridiculously adversarial, and increasingly you can't opt out by doing your research, or buying once-trusted brands, or spending extra money. From coffee-makers to mouse traps, almost everything sucks, even after you give up on Amazon. And since we're here, the old saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" also seems hilariously naive and dated. Today you'd start with a marketing department and a few bribes to setup exclusive government and municipal distribution contracts if you were serious, and then make the worst possible trap you could get away with. With 8 billion people and a world-wide market, what kind of idiot would care about customers returning? A startup would invent the perfect thing in a day, then sell it to Big MouseTrap who would squash it, increase ad budgets, and push substandard mouse technology even harder. While we're all getting used to the treadmill of buy, break, and buy again as if this were just normal, let's take a moment to contemplate the old man yelling at the clouds. It's not always for his benefit only, but sometimes truly an effort to educate the public about something they are missing.
- crote 2y ago
  It does make me wonder why we aren't really seeing "guaranteed quality" brands pop up. There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy. Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?

buildsjets 2y ago

Most people don’t write Amazon reviews. Only picky, whiny, complainey people take the time to write Amazon reviews. Or leave Hackernews comments.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
d0mine 2y ago
Seems a bit self-critical of you to believe that ;)
- emptiestplace 2y ago
  Excellent joke explanation!

snakeyjake 2y ago

If the article was wrong, those reviews wouldn't even exist because people would never assume that the HOODOOVOODOO-brand product that's 1/4th the price of something that's not named by a passphrase generator is any good due to a basic understanding of how the world works. And Darn Tough would have a monopoly on socks. People only care about cost. The #1 irrefutable indicator of this is airline ticket prices: if Airline A charges $117 for a ticket and Airline B charges $110 but will also kick you in the nuts and nickel-and-dime you for everything to the point that it actually costs more in the end than Airline A... ...people will choose Airline B every time. The vast majority of people will search for a flight, sort by price, and buy the cheapest ticket no matter what.

prmph 2y ago
The fact that people choose the cheapest of something does not mean they don't care about quality. It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much. To prove this, imagine if airline A & B had similar very cheap prices (and the attendant poor service that comes with it), but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
- snakeyjake 2y ago
  >It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much. That, what you just wrote, your own words, not my, but your, assertion, literally and explicitly means that people don't care about quality. >but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B. This is demonstrably false and every airline that has tried has either failed or been subsidized by their national government. (Signed, a former Continental Airlines devotee.)
  - compiler-guy 2y ago
    Plenty of people will never, ever, fly RyanAir. And plenty of people choose an airline based on the airline's loyalty rewards program which gives them a higher-quality product (earlier boarding, more leg room, easier changes to flights). It's quite routine among people who travel a lot. If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them. Yes, airplane travellers are incredibly price conscious--that's the nature of a near-commodity market. But nearly every single flight has a significant fraction of travelers who have paid more for a higher-quality product.